Arthur Rimbaud was born into the provincial middle class of Charleville (now part of Charleville - Mézières) in the Ardennes département
in
northeastern France. He was the second child of a career soldier,
Frédéric Rimbaud, and his wife Marie - Catherine - Vitalie
Cuif.
His father, a Burgundian of Provençal extraction, rose from a simple recruit to the rank of captain, and spent the greater part of his army
years in foreign service.
Captain Rimbaud fought in the conquest of Algeria and was awarded the Légion d'honneur.
The Cuif family was a
solidly established Ardennais family, but they
were plagued by unstable and bohemian characters; two of Arthur
Rimbaud's uncles from
his mother's side were alcoholics.
Captain
Rimbaud and Vitalie married in February 1853; in the following November
came the birth of their first child, Jean - Nicolas -
Frederick. The next
year, on 20 October 1854, Jean - Nicolas - Arthur was born. Three more
children, Victorine (who died a month after
she was born), Vitalie and
Isabelle, followed. Arthur Rimbaud's infancy is said to have been
prodigious; a common myth states that soon
after his birth he had
rolled onto the floor from a cushion where his nurse had put him only
to begin crawling toward the door. In a more
realistic retelling of his childhood, Mme Rimbaud recalled when after putting her second son in the care of a nurse in Gespunsart,
supplying clean linen and a cradle for him, she returned to find the
nurse's child sitting in the crib wearing the clothes meant for Arthur.
Meanwhile, the dirty and naked child that was her own was happily
playing in an old salt chest.
Soon after the birth of Isabelle, when Arthur was six years old, Captain Rimbaud left to join his regiment in Cambrai and never returned.
He
had become irritated by domesticity and the presence of the children
while Madame Rimbaud was determined to rear and educate her
family by
herself. The young Arthur Rimbaud was therefore under the complete governance of his mother, a strict Catholic,
who raised him
and his older brother and younger sisters in a stern and
religious household. After her husband's departure, Mme Rimbaud became
known as "Widow Rimbaud".
Fearing
that her children were spending too much time with and being
over-influenced by neighbouring children of the poor, Mme Rimbaud
moved
her family to the Cours d'Orléans in 1862.
This
was a better neighborhood, and whereas the boys were previously taught
at home
by their mother, they were then sent, at the ages of nine and
eight, to the Pension Rossat. For the five years that they attended
school,
however, their formidable mother still imposed her will upon
them, pushing for scholastic success. She would punish her sons by
making
them learn a hundred lines of Latin verse by heart and if they
gave an inaccurate recitation, she would deprive them of meals. When Arthur was nine, he wrote a 700-word essay objecting to his having to learn Latin in
school. Vigorously condemning a classical education as a mere gateway
to a salaried position, Rimbaud wrote repeatedly, "I will be a rentier
(one who lives off his assets)".
He
disliked schoolwork and his mother's continued control and constant
supervision; the children were not allowed to leave their mother's
sight, and, until the boys were sixteen and fifteen respectively, she
would walk them home from the school grounds.
As
a boy, Arthur was small, brown - haired and pale with what a childhood
friend called "eyes of pale blue irradiated with dark blue — the
loveliest eyes I've seen".
When he was eleven, Arthur had his First Communion;
despite his intellectual and individualistic nature, he was an ardent
Catholic like his mother. For this reason he was called "sale petit Cagot" ("snotty little prig") by his fellow schoolboys. He
and his brother were sent to the Collège de Charleville for
school that same year. Until this time, his reading was confined almost
entirely to the Bible,
but he also enjoyed fairy tales and stories of adventure such as the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Gustave Aimard. He
became a highly successful student and was head of his class in all
subjects but sciences and mathematics. Many of his schoolmasters
remarked upon the young student's ability to absorb great quantities of
material. In 1869 he won eight first prizes in the school, including
the prize for Religious Education, and in 1870 he won seven firsts.
When
he had reached the third class, Mme Rimbaud, hoping for a brilliant
scholastic future for her second son, hired a tutor, Father
Ariste
Lhéritier, for private lessons.
Lhéritier
succeeded in sparking the young scholar's love of Greek and Latin as
well as French
classical literature. He was also the first person to
encourage the boy to write original verse in both French and Latin. Rimbaud's
first
poem to appear in print was "Les Etrennes des orphelins" ("The
Orphans' New Year's Gift"), which was published in the 2 January
1870
issue of Revue pour tous.
Two weeks after his poem was printed, a new teacher named Georges Izambard arrived
at the Collège de Charleville. Izambard became Rimbaud's
literary mentor and soon a close accord formed between professor and
student and Rimbaud for a short time saw Izambard as a kind of older
brother figure. At
the age of fifteen, Rimbaud was showing maturity as a poet; the first
poem he showed Izambard, "Ophélie", would later be included in
anthologies as one of Rimbaud's three or four best poems.
When the Franco - Prussian War broke
out, Izambard left Charleville and Rimbaud became despondent. He ran
away to Paris with no money for his ticket and was subsequently
arrested and imprisoned for a week. After returning home, Rimbaud ran
away to escape his mother's wrath.
From
late October 1870, Rimbaud's behaviour became outwardly provocative; he
drank alcohol, spoke rudely, composed scatological poems, stole books
from local shops, and abandoned his hitherto characteristically neat
appearance by allowing his hair to grow long. At
the same time he wrote to Izambard about his method for attaining
poetical transcendence or visionary power through a "long,
intimidating, immense and rational derangement of all the senses. The
sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I
have recognized myself as a poet." It is rumoured that he briefly joined the Paris Commune of 1871, which he portrayed in his poem L'orgie parisienne (ou : Paris se repeuple), ("The Parisian Orgy" or "Paris Repopulates"). Another poem, Le cœur volé ("The Stolen Heart"), is often interpreted as a description of him being raped by drunken Communard soldiers, but this is unlikely since Rimbaud continued to support the Communards and wrote poems sympathetic to their aims.
Rimbaud was encouraged by friend and office employee Charles Auguste Bretagne to write to Paul Verlaine, an eminent Symbolist poet, after letters to other poets failed to garner replies. Taking
his advice, Rimbaud sent Verlaine two letters containing several of his
poems, including the hypnotic, gradually shocking "Le Dormeur du Val"
(The Sleeper in the Valley), in which certain facets of Nature are
depicted and called upon to comfort an apparently sleeping soldier.
Verlaine, who was intrigued by Rimbaud, sent a reply that stated,
"Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you" along with a
one-way ticket to Paris.
Rimbaud arrived in late September 1871 at Verlaine's invitation and resided briefly in Verlaine's home.
Verlaine,
who was married to the seventeen year old and pregnant Mathilde
Mauté, had recently left his job and taken up drinking. In later
published recollections of his first sight of Rimbaud, Verlaine
described him at the age of seventeen as having "the real head of a
child, chubby and fresh, on a big, bony rather clumsy body of a
still growing adolescent, and whose voice, with a very strong Ardennes
accent, that was almost a dialect, had highs and lows as if it were
breaking."
Rimbaud and Verlaine began a short and torrid affair. Whereas Verlaine had likely engaged in prior homosexual experiences,
it
remains uncertain whether the relationship with Verlaine was
Rimbaud's first. During their time together they led a wild,
vagabond like life spiced by absinthe and hashish.
They scandalized the Parisian literary coterie on account of the outrageous behaviour of Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible, who throughout this period continued to write strikingly visionary verse. The stormy relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine eventually brought them to London in September 1872,
a
period about which Rimbaud would later express regret. During this
time, Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son (both of whom he had
abused in his alcoholic rages). Rimbaud and Verlaine lived in
considerable poverty, in Bloomsbury and in Camden Town, scraping a living mostly from teaching, in addition to an allowance from Verlaine's mother. Rimbaud spent his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum where "heating, lighting, pens and ink were free." The relationship between the two poets grew increasingly bitter.
By
late June 1873, Verlaine grew frustrated with the relationship and
returned to Paris, where he quickly began to mourn Rimbaud's
absence.
On 8 July, he telegraphed Rimbaud, instructing him to come to the Hotel
Liège in Brussels; Rimbaud complied at once.
The
Brussels reunion went badly: they argued continuously and Verlaine took refuge in heavy drinking.
On the morning of 10 July, Verlaine
bought a revolver and ammunition. That
afternoon, "in a drunken rage," Verlaine fired two shots at Rimbaud,
one of them wounding the 18
year old in the left wrist. Rimbaud
dismissed the wound as superficial, and did not initially seek to file
charges against Verlaine. But shortly after the shooting, Verlaine (and
his mother) accompanied Rimbaud to a Brussels railway
station, where Verlaine "behaved as if he were insane." His bizarre
behavior induced Rimbaud to "fear that he might give himself over to
new excesses," so he turned and ran away. In his words, "it was then I [Rimbaud] begged a police officer to arrest him [Verlaine]."
Verlaine was arrested for attempted murder and subjected to a humiliating medico - legal examination.
He
was also interrogated with regard to both his intimate correspondence
with Rimbaud and his wife's accusations about the nature of his
relationship with Rimbaud. Rimbaud eventually withdrew the complaint, but the judge nonetheless sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison.
Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his prose work Une Saison en Enfer ("A
Season in Hell") – still widely regarded as
one of the pioneering
examples of modern Symbolist writing — which made various allusions to
his life with Verlaine, described as a drôle
de ménage ("domestic farce") with his frère pitoyable ("pitiful brother") and vierge folle ("mad virgin") to whom he was l'époux infernal ("the
infernal groom"). In 1874 he returned to London with the poet Germain Nouveau
and put together his groundbreaking Illuminations.
Rimbaud and Verlaine met for the last time in March 1875, in Stuttgart, Germany, after Verlaine's release from prison and his conversion to Catholicism. By
then Rimbaud had given up writing and decided on a steady, working
life; some speculate he was fed up with his former wild living, while
others suggest he sought to become rich and independent to afford
living one day as a carefree poet and man of letters. He continued to travel extensively in Europe, mostly on foot.
In May 1876 he enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch Colonial Army
to travel free of charge to Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)
where he promptly deserted, returning to France by ship.
At the official residence of the mayor of Salatiga, a small city 46 km south of
Semarang, capital of Central Java Province, there is a marble plaque stating that Rimbaud was once settled at the city.
In December 1878, Rimbaud arrived in Larnaca, Cyprus, where he worked for a construction company as a foreman at a stone quarry. In
May of the following year he had to leave Cyprus because of a fever, which on his return to France was diagnosed as typhoid.
In 1880 Rimbaud finally settled in Aden, Yemen as a main employee in the Bardey agency. He took several native women as lovers and
for a while he lived with an Ethiopian mistress. In 1884 he left his job at Bardey's to become a merchant on his own account in Harar,
Ethiopia.
Rimbaud's commercial dealings notably included coffee and weapons. In
this period, Rimbaud struck up a very close friendship
with the
Governor of Harar, Ras Makonnen, father of future Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.
In February 1891, Rimbaud developed what he initially thought was arthritis in his right knee. It
failed to respond to treatment and became
agonisingly painful, and by
March the state of his health forced him to prepare to return to France
for treatment.
In Aden, Rimbaud
consulted a British doctor who mistakenly diagnosed tubercular synovitis and recommended immediate amputation.
Rimbaud delayed
until 9 May to set his financial affairs in order before catching the boat back to France. On arrival, he was admitted to hospital in Marseille,
where his right leg was amputated on 27 May. The post-operative diagnosis was cancer. After
a short stay at his family home in Charleville, he attempted to travel
back to Africa, but on the way his health deteriorated and he was
readmitted to the same hospital in Marseille where his surgery had been
carried out, and spent some time there in great pain, attended by his
sister Isabelle. Rimbaud died in Marseille on 10 November 1891, at the
age of 37, and he was interred in Charleville.
In May 1871, Rimbaud wrote the celebrated letter commonly called the Lettre du voyant ("Letter
of the Seer"). Written before his first trip to Paris, the letter
expounded his revolutionary theories about poetry and life, while also
denouncing most poets that preceded him. Wishing for new poetic forms
and ideas, he wrote:
I
say it is necessary to be a voyant, make oneself a voyant. The Poet
makes himself a voyant by a long, immense and rational derangement of
all the senses. All the forms of love, suffering, and madness. He
searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only
their quintessences. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even.
He will have to make his inventions smelt, touched, and heard. A
language must be found. Moreover, every word [utterance] being an idea,
the time of a Universal Language will come!
Rimbaud's poetry influenced the
Symbolists, Dadaists and Surrealists, and later writers adopted not only some of his themes, but also his inventive use of form and language. French poet Paul Valéry stated that "all known literature is written in the language of common sense — except Rimbaud's."